by Radley Balko
The LAPD SWAT team was later asked to review the actions of their colleagues in Jefferson County. They found that the officers had followed standard procedure. Perhaps that was just an act of professional courtesy. If not, consider the implications. Columbine was precisely the sort of incident for which the SWAT team had been invented. It was the sort of incident often cited by defenders of SWAT teams to justify their existence. And it was the sort of incident for which even critics of SWAT teams concede the use of a SWAT team would be appropriate. Yet not only did the SWAT teams at the scene not confront the killers, potentially costing innocent lives, but the most respected SWAT team in the country then reviewed the Jefferson County team’s actions and found their actions were appropriate.64
In the following years, Littleton and North Hollywood would be cited ad nauseam by police officials in towns and counties across the country agitating for their own SWAT team, or defending or arguing for more weaponry for the one they already had. When the town of Ithaca, New York, reformulated its SWAT team in 2000, for example, Assistant Commander Peter Tyler was asked why a college town with virtually no violent crime needed a SWAT team in the first place. He pointed to Columbine and similar mass shootings. “I think it’s naive for anyone to think it couldn’t happen here in Ithaca,” he said. Perhaps. But in a different context, Ithaca Police Chief Richard Basile later explained that the reformulated SWAT team would save taxpayers money because its smaller size made it more efficient at its primary duty—serving drug warrants.65 A 2002 Miami Herald article on the spread of SWAT teams in Florida noted that “police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a Columbine-type incident. But in practice, the teams are used mainly to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers. Some of these searches yield as little as a few grams of cocaine or marijuana.”66 As recently as July 2012, Portland, Maine, police chief Michael Sauschuck cited both incidents to justify his department’s acquisition of a military-grade armored truck.67
There have, of course, been a number of other school shootings since Columbine, on both high school and college campuses. And some, like Virginia Tech, have ended with horrifically high body counts. But most such shootings are also over within seconds, far less time than it would take a typical SWAT team to scramble to the scene. (One possible exception is Newtown, where a Connecticut State Police SWAT team arrived quickly, and their presence reportedly persuaded shooter Adam Lanza to kill himself instead of killing more children.) It’s also important to note that though they make huge headlines and spark weeks of breathless coverage, school shootings (and mass shootings in general) are exceedingly rare. University of Virginia psychologist and education professor Dewey Cornell, who studies violence prevention and school safety, has estimated that the typical school campus can expect to see a homicide about once every several thousand years—hardly justification to rush out to get a SWAT team.68 Yet many college campuses now have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and Virginia Tech as the reason they needed one. A recent example is the University of North Carolina–Charlotte Campus Police Department, which started a SWAT team in 2011. Lt. Josh Huffman explained why it was necessary: “The purpose for creating the UNCC SWAT Team is to protect the community and prevent the loss of life. We must be prepared to respond to high risk situations such as those tragedies that occurred at Virginia Tech and Columbine.”69
The number of campuses that will ever host a mass shooting or hostage taking may be vanishingly small, but most campuses produce more than enough pot smokers—and thus dealers to supply them—to keep the SWAT team busy once it’s up and running.
ODDLY ENOUGH, THE MOVE TOWARD AGGRESSIVE EVEN preventative crackdowns on protesters by cops decked out in riot gear kicked into high gear during protests in a city whose police chief was a self-described “progressive hippie.” The head of the Seattle Police Department during the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests was Norm Stamper, the same guy who pioneered community policing and tried to demilitarize the police in San Diego.
It wasn’t that the police in Seattle weren’t prepared. The police department had gone through ten thousand hours of training in the weeks leading up to the event. The state-of-the-art riot gear they had ordered gave them a look that Stamper likened, in his book Breaking Rank, to Darth Vader. When the police come to a protest dressed like that, armed, and expecting confrontation, both police and protesters start to think that a confrontation is inevitable. This was why, at the height of the often-violent protests of the 1970s, Washington, DC, police chief Jerry Wilson put cops in traditional police blues on the front lines, but kept his riot squad on buses parked on side streets—ready, but out of sight.
Stamper says today that he didn’t have the luxury of keeping the cops clad in riot gear off to the side while putting uniformed guys on the front lines; he simply didn’t have enough personnel to do both. It was a large event for a city of Seattle’s size, but there were also reports that law enforcement officials (and there were at least a dozen agencies handling security at the conference) vastly overestimated the size of the protests—again, an indication that overpreparation by the security planners may have given the cops who worked the event a distorted impression of what they were about to face, an impression that then became self-fulfilling. After all the training the department had gone through was done and the event was just days away, Stamper writes, he, as a commander, was feeling confident. We’ve got this sucker covered, he recalls thinking. But the cops themselves were less assured. “They appreciated the training, they loved the new equipment,” Stamper writes, “but they were convinced that the city was in for a real shitstorm.”
And that’s what they got. Midmorning on the first day, demonstrators surged into an intersection and took a seat, locking arms to form what Stamper called “one massive knot of humanity.” A police department field commander told them they’d be arrested. When they didn’t move, he warned them again—and several more times. Then he hit them with gas.
Despite the hours and hours of training, the cops lobbed the tear-gas canisters behind the frontline protesters, giving them the option of either running into plumes of gas, or surging into a line of police officers. That created chaos.
By the time the first day turned to evening, Seattle mayor Paul Schell had declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and banned protests in and around the conference. He also made it a crime to possess a gas mask, an order that almost certainly exceeded his authority and was probably unconstitutional. Rioters and cops continued to clash. The next day Washington governor Gary Locke called in the National Guard.
A Seattle City Council investigation would later find that the police who handled the event were panic-stricken, driven by exaggerated crowd estimates and unfounded rumors. (One such rumor later determined to be untrue was that protesters were tossing Molotov cocktails.) The riots resulted in $20 million in damage to local businesses. But even the vandals, looters, and anarchists never turned violent. There were no fatalities and fewer than 100 injuries, the most serious of which was a broken arm. In 2004 the city reached a financial settlement with 157 protesters who had been illegally arrested. And in 2007 a federal jury found that the city had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of 170 more.
Norm Stamper took responsibility for the disaster and resigned as Seattle police chief. Though he defended the decision to tear-gas peaceful protesters in his 2005 book, he now says he was wrong. In fact, he says, it was the worst mistake of his career.
“I changed my mind during my book tour,” Stamper says. “After I had given a talk in Seattle to promote the book, a guy who had been gassed at the protests in Seattle came up to me and said to me in a soft voice, ‘I had such hope and such respect for you, and I just lost it. I just can’t accept your explanation for why you used tear gas on nonviolent people. I just can’t accept that.’”
Stamper told the man they’d just have to agree to disagree. But when the tour was over, he says he began to ques
tion his own rationale. “I finally turned the corner shortly before a speech to an ACLU gathering at the University of Washington. I told the story about the protests, about the man who had come up to me during my book tour, and I talked about how I had changed my mind. And I said the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the worst professional mistake I had ever made. I didn’t realize it, but the same guy was in the audience that night. He came up to me afterward in tears.”
The “Battle for Seattle” is commonly considered the start of the modern antiglobalization movement. But it was also a landmark event in the way police and city officials react to protests. In spite of the fact that there were few injuries and no fatalities, the images that emerged from Seattle depicted a city that had lost control. Going forward, “control” would be the prevailing objectives for police handling protests. In the years to come, the Darth Vader look would become the standard police presence at large protests. Cities and police officials would commit mass violations of civil and constitutional rights and deal with the consequences later. There would be violent, preemptive SWAT raids, mass arrests, and sweeping use of police powers that ensnared violent protesters, peaceful protesters, and people who had nothing to do with the protest at all.
That’s why Stamper calls his decisions in Seattle “the worst mistake” of his career. He’s seen how the police response to protest has changed since 1999. “We gassed fellow Americans engaging in civil disobedience,” Stamper says. “We set a number of precedents, most of them bad. And police departments across the country learned all the wrong lessons from us. That’s disheartening. So disheartening. I mean, you look at what happened to those Occupy protesters at UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he’s watering a bed of flowers, and I think that we played a part in making that sort of thing so common—so easy to do now. It’s beyond cringe-worthy. I wish to hell my career had ended on a happier note.”70
The Numbers
Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1987: 36
Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1996: over 700
Number of raids carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from 1993 to 1995: 523
Percentage of these ATF raids that used dynamic entry: 49 percent
Percentage of these ATF raids that turned up weapons of any kind: 18 percent
Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in the United States in 1980: 3,000
Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 1995: 30,000
Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 2001: 45,000
Number of SWAT deployments in Orange County, Florida, from 1993 to 1997: 619
Percentage of those SWAT deployments undertaken to serve drug warrants: 94 percent
Number of police officers in the tactical operations branch of the Portland, Oregon, Police Department in 1989: 2
Number of Portland police officers in the tactical operations branch in 1994: 56
Percentage of police departments in cities of 100,000 or more that had a SWAT team in 1982: 59 percent
. . . in 1995: 89 percent
Average number of times each of those SWAT teams was deployed in 1980: 13
. . . in 1989: 38
. . . in 1995: 52
Percentage increase in the number of police departments using tactical units for proactive patrol from 1982 to 1997: 292 percent71
CHAPTER 8
THE 2000S—A WHOLE NEW WAR
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
—SHERIFF LEON LOTT OF RICHLAND COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA, QUOTING MATTHEW 5:9 IN A PRESS RELEASE ANNOUNCING HIS ACQUISITION OF A TRACK-PROPELLED ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIER WITH A BELT-FED ROTATING MACHINE GUN TURRET CAPABLE OF FIRING .50-CALIBER ROUNDS OF AMMUNITION
Betty Taylor still remembers the night it all hit her.
As a child, Taylor had always been taught that police officers were the good guys. She learned to respect law enforcement, as she puts it, “all the time, all the way.” She went on to become a cop because she wanted to help people, and that’s what cops did. She wanted to fight sexual assault, particularly predators who take advantage of children. To go into law enforcement—to become one of the good guys—seemed like the best way to accomplish that. By the late 1990s, she’d risen to the rank of detective in the sheriff’s department of Lincoln County, Missouri—a sparsely populated farming community about an hour northwest of St. Louis. She eventually started a sex crimes unit within the department. But it was a small department with a tight budget. When she couldn’t get the money she needed, Taylor was forced to give speeches and write her own proposals to keep her program operating.
What troubled her was that while the sex crimes unit had to find funding on its own, the SWAT team was always flush with cash. “The SWAT team, the drug guys, they always had money,” Taylor says. “There were always state and federal grants for drug raids. There was always funding through asset forfeiture.” Taylor never quite understood that disparity. “When you think about the collateral effects of a sex crime, of how it can affect an entire family, an entire community, it just didn’t make sense. The drug users weren’t really harming anyone but themselves. Even the dealers, I found much of the time they were just people with little money, just trying to get by.”
The SWAT team eventually co-opted her as a member. As the only woman in the department, she was asked to go along on drug raids in the event there were any children inside. “The perimeter team would go in first. They’d throw all of the adults on the floor until they had secured the building. Sometimes the kids too. Then they’d put the kids in a room by themselves, and the search team would go in. They’d come to me, point to where the kids were, and say, ‘You deal with them.’” Taylor would then stay with the children until family services arrived, at which point they’d be placed with a relative.
Taylor’s moment of clarity came during a raid on an autumn evening in November 2000. Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway. They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick down doors.” With just three hours between the drug buy and the raid, the police hadn’t done much surveillance at all. The SWAT team would often avoid raiding a house if they knew there were children inside, but Taylor was troubled by how little effort they put into seeking out that sort of information. “Three hours is nowhere near enough time to investigate your suspect, to find out who might be inside the house. It just isn’t enough time for you to know the range of things that could happen.”
That afternoon the police had bought drugs from the stepfather of two children, ages eight and six. Both were in the house at the time of the raid. The stepfather wasn’t.
“They did their thing,” Taylor says. “Everybody on the floor, guns and yelling. Then they put the two kids in the bedroom, did their search, then sent me in to take care of the kids.”
Taylor made her way inside to see them. When she opened the door, the eight-year-old girl assumed a defense posture, putting herself between Taylor and her little brother. She looked at Taylor and said, half fearful, half angry, “What are you going to do to us?”
Taylor was shattered. “Here I come in with all my SWAT gear on, dressed in armor from head to toe, and this little girl looks up at me, and her only thought is to defend her little brother. I thought, How can we be the good guys when we come into the house looking like this, screaming and pointing guns at the people they love? How can we be the good guys when a little girl looks up at me and wants to fight me? And for what? What were we accomplishing with all of this? Absolutely nothing.”
Taylor was later appointed police chief of the small town of Winfield, Missouri. Winfield was too small for its own SWAT team, even in the 2000s, but Taylor says she
’d have quit before she ever created one. “Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night. And the mentality changes when they get put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just completely changed him. The us-versus-them mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too. But it’s much, much worse on the SWAT team. They’re more concerned with the drugs than they are with innocent bystanders. Because when you get into that mentality, there are no innocent people. There’s us and there’s the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties.”
Taylor recently ran into the little girl who changed the way she thought about policing. Now in her twenties, the girl told Taylor that she and her brother had nightmares for years after the raid. They slept in the same bed until the boy was eleven. “That was a difficult day at work for me,” she says. “But for her, this was the most traumatic, defining moment of this girl’s life. Do you know what we found? We didn’t find any weapons. No big drug operation. We found three joints and a pipe.”1
POLICE MILITARIZATION WOULD ACCELERATE IN THE 2000s. The first half of the decade brought a new and lucrative source of funding and equipment: homeland security. In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, the federal government opened a new spigot of funding in the name of fighting terror. Terrorism would also provide new excuses for police agencies across the country to build up their arsenals and for yet smaller towns to start up yet more SWAT teams. The second half of the decade also saw more mission creep for SWAT teams and more pronounced militarization even outside of drug policing. The 1990s trend of government officials using paramilitary tactics and heavy-handed force to make political statements or to make an example of certain classes of nonviolent offenders would continue, especially in response to political protests. The battle gear and aggressive policing would also start to move into more mundane crimes—SWAT teams have recently been used even for regulatory inspections.